Project Overview

Since the summer of 2016, we have been collecting sound recordings of birds in the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire. We presently employ more than 50 passive acoustic recorders (Swift recorders, Center for Conservation Bioacoustics, Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology). The recorders are distributed over ~500 ha from 460 - 810 m elevation, with a higher concentration in the 64-ha area where birds and insects have been studied for over 50 years. The units turn themselves on each morning to record from 05:00 - 8:00 and again in the evening from 19:30 - 20:30. Recordings encompass most of the bird breeding season in each year. An analysis of 300 10-minute samples (Symes et al. 2021, 2022) included 130,776 vocalizations from 44 species of birds as well as red squirrels and eastern chipmunks. The growing collection of sound data are being made publicly available through the EDI data portal as a contribution to the Long Term Ecological Research program at Hubbard Brook sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Data permit the development of species lists, rarefaction curves, and vocalization descriptions. They allow for analyses of habitat associations, phenology, and spatial patterning in vocalization activity. These data were gathered as part of the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study (HBES). The HBES is a collaborative effort at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, which is operated and maintained by the USDA Forest Service, Northern Research Station.